Gail Mellow

Mellow was born in 1952.[3] She received an A.A. from Jamestown Community College, the first community college in the State University of New York.[4] She received her B.A. from SUNY Albany and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Social Psychology from George Washington University in Washington, D.C.[5]

Mellow has had several leadership positions in different educational institutions. Immediately previous to her presidency of LaGuardia Community College, she was president of Gloucester County College, a position from which she resigned to take the presidency of LaGuardia, succeeding Raymond C. Bowen.[2][6] Mellow has also served on numerous boards that include the Homeland Security Academic Advisory Council,[7] American Association for Higher Education, the National Commission for Cooperative Education, and the Community College Research Center at Columbia University.

She is the co-author of Minding the Dream: The Process and Practice of the American Community College.[8] She is also the author of numerous articles on the subjects of community colleges, economic development, and diverse faculty development.

Mellow founded and chaired the (NECEA) Northeast Connecticut Economic Alliance, a nonprofit development agency. She was also a member of the Human Resource Development Board of the Connecticut Employment and Training Commission. She represented the United States in the first US-China Community College collaborative conference meeting, which was held in Beijing in 2004. She is a consulting editor for Change magazine, a national magazine for higher education.